Tag: Dee Joyce Hayes

A Spouse Scapegoats a Towel Ring
(“Slippery Motives,” Forensic Files)

The story of Julie Post’s death encompasses a favorite Forensic Files theme:  As much as the show stresses science, many times the little things suspects do or say are more damning.

“Slippery Motive,” the episode about Julie Post’s murder by her husband, New Orleans salesman Ed Post, also contains one of the best quips ever from a prosecutor’s on-camera interview.

Salesman’s personality. I’ll get to that in a minute and also provide an epilogue for Ed, who is still alive three decades after he ended his wife’s life.

So let’s get started on the “Slippery Motive” episode recap, along with extra information from internet research:

Ed Post and Julie Thigpen met at the University of Southern Mississippi and married in 1967.

They moved to Louisiana, where Ed made a name for himself as a real estate agent, thanks in part to what Forensic Files calls his sophisticated manner.

Cajun success story. After Julie joined his firm, Wagner & Truax, she sold around $1 million in real estate a year, according to Forensic Files. But later, someone mentioned that she made only around $20,000 annually.

That confused me a little because if the firm charges the standard 6 percent commission, why didn’t Julie get at least half of that, which would add up to $30,000?

On the other hand, she started working there in 1982, when $20,000 a year was pretty decent scratch.

Together, the couple were earning enough to afford a wine collection worth $30,000, according to St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Bill McClellan, who went on to write a mass-market paperback called Evidence of Murder (Onyx, 1993) about Julie Post’s homicide.

(Note: Forensic Files references Wagner & Truax as the real estate firm that Ed Post partly owned, but a reader recently wrote in that he wasn’t an owner and the firm where he worked was actually Gertrude Gardner Realtors.)

Worst convention ever. But all that affluence wasn’t enough for the chubby 5-foot-7-inch Ed. He became infatuated with a cute colleague. She already had a well-to-do husband, and it was theorized that Ed wanted to turn himself into an even better provider than her spouse.

A trip the Posts took to St. Louis for a real estate conference gave Ed an opportunity to put a homicide plan into action.

He drowned Julie in the bathtub early in the morning on June 3, 1986, then quickly jumped into a T-shirt and shorts.

On his way out of the Omni Hotel in Union Station, where they were staying, Ed stopped by the concierge desk to thank her for a recommendation. Next, he introduced himself to the doorman and mentioned he was going jogging.

Big payout. Upon his return, he “discovered” his wife unresponsive in the tub. Police found a broken-off towel ring in the water. It looked as though Julie had grabbed it for support, it came loose from the tile wall, and then she fell, hit her head, and drowned.

Ed Post might have gotten away with it, but his greed turned reckless. He immediately called his lawyer brother to the scene, where they photographed evidence of the allegedly homicidal towel ring, in preparation for a lawsuit against the hotel (see Mark Winger).

And one more gift for prosecutors: Ed had purchased a $300,000 life insurance policy on Julie less than a month before her death.

Gratuitous interaction. At first, however, it looked as though authorities were buying the accidental-drowning story, and Julie Post’s body was transported to New Orleans for burial in Metairie Cemetery.

The St. Louis Post Dispatch reported on the death at the Omni, and it caught the eye of a prosecutor from the Missouri attorney general’s office.

Dee Joyce-Hayes didn’t buy all the towel-ring shaming.

Oh, come on. She also found it odd that Ed Post thought it necessary to introduce himself by first and last name to the Omni doorman and explain where he was going.

“It’s from the book of ‘Who Cares?’ ” she said. (Best quip of the season.)

Clearly, Ed Post was trying to establish an alibi.

Soon, more authorities took an interest in the case as a possible homicide.

Hardware inquisition. Next came the trial by combat of the towel ring. Investigators had a woman of about Julie Post’s weight and height test an attached, intact towel ring in another bathroom at the Omni Hotel.

After numerous trials, investigators determined that it would take a person weighing 480 pounds — or a person weighing 120 pounds who was descending from 64 feet — to pull the towel ring directly off the wall in the way they found it at the murder scene.

The lab concluded that someone standing outside the tub, with a foot against the side, violently and deliberately wrenched the towel wring from its mount on the tile wall.

Dead giveaway. After exhuming Julie Post’s body, the coroner found marks that suggested someone had held her head down in the water.

The authorities did a great job with the forensics, but the towel ring factor got undue attention, in my opinion. There was no way of determining the condition of the towel ring before it came off the wall in the Posts’ room. Maybe it had a loosened mounting plate or was defective.

As Dee Joyce-Hayes pointed out, Ed Post’s gratuitous explanation to the doorman was the real red flag.

Too much info. Even the friendliest of business travelers is not going to introduce himself to the doorman by first and last name. The guy had a hidden agenda.

Ed Post also made sure to have a long narrative about the sights he took in on his jog, including Busch Stadium, the Gateway Arch, and city hall.

U.S. Prosecutor Dean Hoag called Post “a detail man done in by details” as reported by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on May 29, 1989:

“Hoag asked the jury to recall the testimony of New Orleans insurance inspector George Leggio, who said Post had kept offering him details of the ‘accident’ when all Leggio wanted was Julie Post’s health record before her death.”

Talking down to them. Ed Post’s trial for first degree murder started in 1989. In addition to the towel ring test and the accounting of the financial windfall Post would receive upon his wife’s death, the evidence included testimony that he joked around — at Julie Post’s funeral — about wanting to date his aforementioned cute colleague’s twin sister .

And there was also the matter of Ed Post’s business, Jackson & Truax, having fallen on hard times. In the mid-1980s, the New Orleans real estate market wasn’t exactly a zydeco dance party.

The jury found Ed guilty of first-degree murder after a day of deliberation. Forensic Files noted that his condescending tone on the witness stand had struck out with the jury.

A judge gave Post a sentence of life in jail without parole.

Family turns. Apparently, Post’s lawyers had offered him the chance to be considered for second-degree murder as well as first degree, but he declined, preferring “all or nothing,” according to a St. Louis Post-Dispatch story on May 24, 2014.

But the murder conviction was overturned because of evidence that the sheriff’s deputies got a little too buddy-buddy with the jurors.

By the time of his second trial in 1992, Ed Post’s brother, older daughter, and best friend (Harby Kreeger) no longer believed in his innocence. They testified against him.

Daughter’s ordeal. As if Stephanie Post hadn’t suffered enough by virtue of losing her mother, during her three hours of testimony, defense lawyer Rick Sindel brought up the fact that she’d had an abortion after being raped.

Stephanie, who cried several times on the stand, also said that her father had abused, and had pointed a gun at, her mother.

In 1985, Julie Post had told her daughters that she and Ed were getting a divorce and they would have to switch from private to public schools, Stephanie testified.

Blame the pills. At some point during one of the trials (it’s not clear which), Dan Post testified that Julie had told him about physical abuse she suffered at Ed’s hands. Oddly, that information was supposed to work in Ed’s favor: The fact that he had a temper was intended to suggest he killed Julie in a fit of anger, punishable as second-degree murder instead of first-degree.

By this time, prison life had worn away Ed Post’s cockiness and he just wanted a deal, according to McClellan. Circuit Judge Timothy J. Wilson accepted Post’s guilty plea to second-degree murder in return for a 30-year sentence with the chance of parole.

Post admitted to drowning his wife but blamed it partly on his being on diet pills at the time. He apologized to Julie Post’s survivors. Julie’s father later remarked that the contrition gave him a bit of solace.

So where is Ed Post today, and what does he have to say for himself?

Gone quiet. After turning down several of his requests for release over the years, the parole board allowed him to exit Missouri Eastern Correctional Center in Pacific in 2014 at the age of 69.

As far as what he has to say, apparently he doesn’t. Post started keeping a low profile before his prospective integration back into the free world and has continued to do so.

As for an epilogue for Julie Post’s older daughter, Stephanie married a doctor who does work for Doctors Without Borders. Her husband attended at least one of the parole hearings to ask that Ed Post be kept in prison.

Dee Joyce-Hayes went into private practice at Sonnenschein, Nath & Rosenthal and now is general counsel at the Bi-State Development Agency, according to her LinkedIn profile. I hope she gets a TV show of her own some day.

That’s all for this post. Until next time, cheers. — RR

Watch the Forensic Files episode on YouTube or Amazon Prime